July 4th Quiz: Was the Revolution Caused by a Misunderstanding Over a Word?

Thomas P. Slaughter is the author of "Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution" (Hill & Wang) and the Arthur R. Miller Professor of History at the University of Rochester.

Americans
are proud of our independence. It is not just the Day or the
Declaration we celebrate, but the core cultural trait that we
cherish. We want to share our independence globally, whether the
Iraqis, among others, want it or not. We are so independent that we
define community narrowly—the citizens of Trenton, New Jersey
cannot borrow books from the Princeton Public Library thirteen miles
away, which is in the same county and a branch of the county library
system; Philadelphia’s public schools are not the problem of its
suburbs, which are independent of it, as is true more often than not
for city/suburban relationships nationwide. Some states, such as New
York, have a publicly-supported mental health system with pretty good
services for most citizens (although better in Brooklyn and West
Chester than in Buffalo and Batavia), while some states, such as
Virginia, have less robust services even for federal programs.

We
are, in sum, independent of each other and many of us believe that
we, as citizens and as communities, are not independent enough of the
federal government, the United Nations, and any and all efforts to
define community more expansively. America has imperial ambitions,
but an independent culture resists our full participation as citizens
of a nation and of a world that is integrated economically and
environmentally. It matters to people in New England if states in the
Midwest burn coal to fuel power plants; indeed, it matters in Nova
Scotia, Newfoundland, Greenland, and Iceland, where the weather goes
after it falls off the Weather Channel maps that end at Maine’s
northern border. But listen to the complaints about the President’s
intrusion into the independence of fossil-fuel producing states when
the Executive Branch tries to regulate the air quality that affects
global climate.

The
expansive definition of independence, with its obverse of defining
community narrowly, is not new but it is very American and pre-dates
our existence as a nation. “If you ask an American who is his
master,” Member of Parliament Richard Sutton observed in 1774, as
others had for over a century, “he will tell you he has none, nor
any governor but Jesus Christ.” This independent spirit was a
central tension between the British Empire and its American colonists
for 150 years and defined the conflict that led to the War for
Independence in 1775 and its Declaration a year later. And yet, as
late as May 1774, the Pennsylvania Committee of Correspondence would
say, as the vast majority of colonists still would have, that “the
idea of an unconstitutional independence on the parent state is
utterly abhorrent to our principles.”

Many
of the colonists crossed the Atlantic in search of independence from
Europe—religious, economic, personal, communal, and political—and
built their new lives on the backs of slaves and the land of Indians
whose independence they stole. The colonists prided themselves on
their independence, by which they meant that they were courageous,
self-sufficient, and devoted to family, parish, village, and God’s
higher law. They committed themselves to local relationships over
distant ones and cast a suspicious eye on even their own colonial
governments, which many of them considered remote and
unrepresentative. Still, they sought to carve out this independence
within, not apart from, the empire to which they proudly belonged.

Americans
claimed their independence based on political principles imbedded in
spiritual beliefs that led them to be less respectful of hierarchy
than their monarch demanded, so when British officials accused
Americans of being independent, they used the term pejoratively,
meaning chronically rebellious and insufficiently attentive to the
greater good of the Empire. In 1699, New York’s Governor Richard
Coote (the first Earl of Bellomont) had lectured the assembly on its
“Independence from the Crown of England. . . . You need not be told
to what degree Faction and Sedition have taken Root in this Town,
‘tis a thing so generally known.” According to attorney Charles
Bowler of Newport, Rhode Island, who wrote in 1758, “Many of these
people think themselves Independent, that the King and Parliament of
Great-Britain, have no more Right to make Laws for us, than the
Mohawks.” And yet, they considered themselves loyal subjects of the
British Crown.

Living
at such a distance from the locus of authority made colonists even
more independent over time than they were when they or their
ancestors crossed the Atlantic. Distraction and neglect by the
British imperial ministries before 1750 nurtured this independence,
which habits on both sides of the ocean entrenched. Then, as the
colonies’ domestic economies and population grew, as colonists
expanded their settlements into North America’s vast interior and
became ethnically heterogeneous, they developed identities
independent of the one that tethered them to the British Empire and
to their provincial capitals back East. In 1746, after the British
had seized Canada from the French in the War of the Austrian
Succession, the Duke of Beford feared that if it were not returned,
which it was at the war’s close two years later, the lack of a
powerful enemy on their border would create among Americans “an
independence . . . in those provinces towards their mother country.”
For similar reasons, the British Empire sought to slow the march of
colonists westward with the Proclamation Line of 1763 and other
regulations, but failed.

Colonists
continued to strive for independence within
the Empire, while British administrators continued to believe that
the colonists were aiming at independence from
the empire. New York’s Governor Thomas Tryon believed as late as
August 1773 that it would be a “great injustice to America were I
to hold up an idea that the bulk of inhabitants wishes an
independency” from the British Empire. The tipping point came in
1774 and 1775, when a critical mass of colonists started to believe
that they were losing
their independence, while the imperial ministries were fighting to
keep the colonies from becoming
independent, from separating from the empire.

The
rhetorical confusion is as much ours as theirs, but it does help to
distinguish between independence and separation, for they were not
the same in the minds of colonists before the late spring and summer
of 1774. It is difficult to identify before then more than a handful
of colonists who advocated separation from the British Empire,
although many imagined that a separate nation would eventually arise
organically in North America, given the colonies’ economic and
demographic growth, and that their descendants would conquer the
continent. As late as April 1774, the worst case that John Adams
could imagine was the next
generation facing a war for separation. “I am of the same opinion
that I have been for many Years,” Adams wrote, “that there is not
Spirit enough on Either side to bring the Question to a compleat
Decision.” Adams underestimated his fellow colonists’
independence and the British Empire’s determination to bring them
under control.

The
Boston Tea Party provoked a stern response and neither side was
willing to compromise on the principles that divided them. While
British officials had accused the colonists of “aiming at
independence” for over a century, by January 1775, Lord Lyttelton
shared the views of others in the House of Lords about the Americans,
that “the whole of their deliberations and proceedings breathed the
spirit of unconstitutional independency and open rebellion.” It
was, he thought, “time to assert the authority of Great Britain”
lest inaction “bring about that state of traitorous independence,
at which it was too plain they were now aiming.” While Lord
Chatham, William Pitt believed as late as January 1776 that
“independency was falsely charged on” the colonists, as it long
had been by imperial officials who misunderstood the Americans.

As
the American ideology of independence has made its way west, it has
been carried to extremes by the likes of Clive Bundy, Jerad and
Amanda Miller, and the Tea Party Movement, which finds its roots in
the Revolutionary era. Others believe that the globe is now too small
for America’s eighteenth-century notions of independence. The
question for all of us is about the limits of independence and the
borders of our community--not just whether we are our brother's
keeper but who are our brothers and sisters, where our responsibility
extends, and whether our village now embraces the globe.